alt Hacker NewsI believe it is food for thought — would one ever say "this was the nice evening"?
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
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“At the start of the year, my crystal ball told me that all my evenings this year are going to be bad except for one. This was the nice evening.”
Absent any context, “the nice evening” sounds strange because no one really expects there to be only one nice evening.
However it can makes sense if the surrounding context supports the idea of only one nice evening.
Grammar rules are generally about the surrounding context which allow us to leave out superfluous or repeated information and still be understood. Things sound strange when that missing information can’t be deduced from context.